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| Pitchforkmedia |
 The previous records I've heard from Dusseldorf-based pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann, who records as Hauschka, have revolved around the titular instrument of his 2005 release The Prepared Piano. That album seemed to crystalize certain connections between the modified piano and later developments in experimental music. Bertelmann began with an approach to piano popularized by John Cage, who in the 1930s placed screws, pieces of rubber, and other objects between strings in order to turn the instrument into a kind of miniature percussion orchestra. As with avant-garde mainstays like Christian Wolff or David Tudor, Bertelmann in concert has been known to climb inside the piano itself between pieces to modify its innards, adding treatments and monkeying with the wires in search of new textures. But unlike any of these composers, he prefers melodies with a folk-like simplicity, pieces you can hum, with the comforting repetition of Glass/Reich-style minimalism serving as a rhythmic underpinning. So Bertelmann transports these innovations into a more melodic neo-pop context, while also adding some light electronic processing as a tip of the hat to the possibilities of computers. He's showed how familiar music can be transformed and made new by manipulations in the physical and virtual realms, but his music is easily enjoyed by listeners with no time for classical music....full text |
| Prefixmag |
| As it's evolved, Hauschka's music has become less preoccupied with placing things upon and between his piano strings. The Dusseldorf-based composer is still an avowed proponent of prepared piano, that recent century tradition of manipulating the innards of a grand to evoke sounds controlled as much by the composer as the piano itself. But Hauschka (a.k.a. Volker Bertelmann) has always had a pop streak, as well as a yen to explore the same strange, almost reverent electronic tones that burble through the work of contemporaries like Klimek and Mum. In other words, Bertelmann is a great fit for the Mueslix-tronic Fat Cat sound....full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| Last year, Karaoke Kalk released a remix album of Hauschka’s works that underscored the quirky versatility of the prepared piano, an instrument that can author glitchy percussive tricks while skating atop crystalline lines of melody at the same time. Bertmann’s use of the instrument is closer to that of John Cage, who wrote sonatas for it in the 1940s, than that of Anthony Pateras, whose dense avant-garde explorations of it conjure Charlemagne Palestine and his maximalist/minimalist contemporaries. In fact, for a few songs on this disc, you wouldn’t even know that the piano being played was not a traditional hammers-and-string Steinway. The occasional buzz and crackle zip through the fat cushions of orchestral accompaniment, but Ferndorf is otherwise a straight-up, albeit lovely, classical album. Bertmann claims the album is a reflection upon the natural landscapes of his childhood, which places this work, weirdly enough, in line with compatriot Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas box set from earlier this year and, less directly, with Jan Jelinek’s Tierbeobachtungen of 2006. Voigt, the techno impresario at the helm of Kompakt records, has remarked on the drugged pastoral leitmotif of his work as Gas; Ferndorf traffics in a similarly nostalgic, back-to-nature economy. The thematic relation between the records is clear enough. Musically, however, they are quite distinct. Voigt’s techno meditations contrast starkly with Hauschka’s urgent, twinkling reaches into the past. “Freibad” encapsulates this aesthetic with somber peals of horn, lusty strings, and the plinks, plunks, and clangs of the piano. “Barfuss Durch Gras” is the prelude to a rainstorm, its curiously mangled tones drizzling down in stop-motion polyrhythm. “Heimat” begins almost too sweetly before a clever swoop into cut-time that evokes Gonzales’ gymnopedic etudes. “Eltern” maps the most complex emotional turf of the record thanks to the nuanced production; it’s a hydraulic elegy for innocence, spitting, cooing, and sighing its way to a disconsolate finish....full text |
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